TruckDrive

Getting a Truck Driver Home for the Holidays Starts With a Request Weeks Ahead It’s the first week of November, you’re loading lettuce in Yuma, and you want to be at your own table on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26, less than three weeks away. Christmas is seven weeks out. Getting a truck driver home for…

How to Check a Trucking Company Before You Sign On “How to check a trucking company before I apply?” is a question drivers usually ask after a bad experience. The short version: take the company’s USDOT number, open the free SAFER Company Snapshot from FMCSA and read five things on one page. Status, authority, size,…

Cell Phone Rules for Truck Drivers Come Down to One Touch and No Hands In the study FMCSA used to write its cell phone rules for truck drivers, texting made a safety-critical event 23 times more likely. The researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute watched truck drivers on real routes and found that a…

Truck Speed Limits by State and the Seven States Where Trucks Run Slower Than Cars California holds a loaded tractor-trailer to 55 mph on a rural interstate where the car next to you can legally do 70. That 15 mph gap is the widest in the country. Truck speed limits by state differ from car…

Your DataQs Challenge Now Gets Three Reviews and a 21-Day Clock On October 16, 2026, FMCSA announced that all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. territories now meet its reformed DataQs review requirements. For a driver, that changes what happens to a DataQs challenge against a violation you think the officer got wrong. The…

DEF Derate Limits From 5 mph to 25 mph and What EPA Plans Next A DEF derate on older engine software can end at 5 mph, and EPA’s guidance from 2007–2013 described getting there about four hours after the fault. At 5 mph, a shop 30 miles away is six hours of your 11-hour driving…

Sick on the Road With a Loaded Reefer and a Delivery Clock Running Say you wake up in the sleeper at a truck stop on I-80 in Nebraska and the thermometer reads 101°F (38.3°C). There’s a loaded reefer behind you and a delivery 30 hours out. Being sick on the road changes the order of…

Carbon Monoxide Poisoning in Trucks and the Push for a Sleeper Alarm On October 13, 2026, a petition asking FMCSA to require carbon monoxide alarms in every truck with a sleeper berth was posted in the agency’s petitions docket on regulations.gov. It was filed by Todd Daum of Cincinnati, a CDL-A holder and retired firefighter….

Truck Idling Laws by State and City, With the Limits and the Fines A heavy truck burns about 0.8 gallon of diesel an hour at idle, according to Argonne National Laboratory. At the EIA average of $6.199 a gallon on October 5, 2026, that’s just under $5 an hour, or roughly $50 over a 10-hour…

Time Zones for Truck Drivers, From the Dock Clock to the ELD The receiver in Columbus, Ohio, wants you at door 14 at 6:00 a.m. Your ELD, set to a terminal in Illinois, will read 5:00 a.m. when you back in. Mixing up those two clocks is the oldest way to miss a reefer appointment,…